THE AMBASSADOR'S WIFE (An Inspector Samuel Tay Novel)

by Jake Needham

  A couple of hours later, just after nine, Tay remembered he had intended to call the lawyer in New York that evening, but then he realized he had left the man’s letter in his office and didn’t have the telephone number. Awash in his own foolishness and his failures of the day, Tay turned on the television and sat staring at it for two hours with only the dimmest realization of what he was seeing. Then he turned it off, brushed his teeth, and went to bed.

  Tomorrow, he promised himself, would be a better day.

  Or maybe it wouldn’t.

  ON Friday morning Sergeant Kang brought Tay a copy of the FMB report. Just as Kang had predicted, there wasn’t a thing in it of any use.

  “Any progress on the ID, Sergeant?”

  “We’re almost through the visitor list, sir. Nothing at all yet.”

  “This woman didn’t parachute in. If she’s not a local, she’s a visitor. There are no other possibilities.”

  “Maybe she was in some kind of special group and isn’t on the regular visitor list.”

  Tay thought about that. “What kind of group would that be?”

  “I don’t know, sir. It was just an idea.”

  “Well, I doubt that’s the answer, but maybe you’d better ask Immigration if that’s possible.”

  “Right, sir.”

  Sergeant Kang started out of Tay’s office, but suddenly stopped and turned around again.

  “I almost forgot, sir. The autopsy is scheduled for two o’clock. Since it’s right after lunch, and with the facilities being so conveniently located just across the street from here and all, I assume you’ll be popping over after you polish off a nice big plate of chicken curry?”

  Tay had no intention of rising to the bait.

  “Who’s the forensic pathologist assigned?” he asked instead.

  “Don’t know, sir. You want me to find out so you’ll be sure to knock on the right door?”

  “Get out of here, Sergeant.”

  “Yes, sir.” Kang grinned and disappeared.

  Tay’s lunchtime routine on Fridays had become for him a ritual of some significance. Today, especially today, he had absolutely no intention of altering it.

  Instead of eating lunch on Fridays, he took a taxi to one of two places: Borders in Wheelock Place or Kinokuniya in Ngee Ann City. They were the two biggest bookstores he had ever seen and browsing through them without any specific purpose in mind was about as much fun as he had these days. Sometimes he bought some fiction. Sometimes he bought some nonfiction. Once, seized by a fit of something he was still unable to identify, he had even bought a book called Living and Working in France, but that had been an aberration.

  Regardless of what books Tay bought, however, he was happy to know that he would have their company over the weekend. He didn’t drink much, he wouldn’t go shopping except perhaps at gunpoint, and he loathed golf. That left nothing much for him to do in Singapore on the weekends other than read books, and it was that pursuit that kept him going back either to Borders or Kinokuniya almost every Friday at lunchtime.

  Tay had long ago decided that his custom of spending his Friday lunch hours in a bookstore had two particular benefits: one mental and one physical. The mental benefit was that the ordered ranks of books tidily subdivided into categories and subcategories testified to the existence of mankind’s thirst for understanding, and prompted Tay to contemplate there might be order and meaning in the universe after all. The physical benefit was that it forced him to skip a meal. He could stand to lose about five pounds. Maybe ten. He really could.

  This particular Friday, it was Borders’ privilege to bask in Tay’s patronage. Trying to take his mind off the image of the battered body propped up on the bed at the Marriott, he splurged a little and loaded up. He bought the British edition of Esquire, which he thought far superior to the American version of the magazine, a breathtakingly expensive three-volume biography of Graham Greene, and a paperback copy of a Martin Cruz Smith novel set in Japan that he had intended to read when it first came out but had never gotten around to.

  Tay was pleased with his purchases and when he spotted an empty table in the outdoor area of Borders Café he plunked himself down without giving a thought to the time. He ordered a cappuccino that was served to him in a white ceramic cup the size of a cereal bowl. He wasn’t certain whether smoking was allowed there, but there had to be some benefit in being a policeman so he said to hell with it and smoked two Marlboros fired up with his brand new lighter anyway. When he was done, he tucked the lighter carefully away in his pocket. This time he had no intention of abandoning it in some idiotic gesture intended to purge his guilt over smoking.

  By the time Tay returned to the Cantonment Complex it was very nearly three o’clock. There were no messages of any consequence waiting for him and he gathered his long lunch hour had gone completely unnoticed. He was just trying to decide whether that amounted to good or bad news when his telephone rang.

  “Yes?”

  “Inspector Tay?”

  It was a woman’s voice, a very nice voice, but one that Tay didn’t recognize. Nevertheless, its agreeable quality prompted him to admit his identity without undue delay.

  “This is Susan Hoi,” the woman said.

  That was no help. Tay was reasonably certain he had never heard of anyone named Susan Hoi.

  “Yes?” he said as noncommittally as possible.

  “I’ll have a preliminary report by the end of the day, but there are several things I thought you would like to know now.”

  Tay found it terminally annoying when people started talking on the telephone as if you already knew exactly what they were talking about when you didn’t, even women with very nice voices. One thing pretty much cancelled out the other as far as he was concerned, and he felt completely relieved of any inclination he might normally have toward courteous behavior.

  “Who the hell are you?” he asked the woman.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I asked who you are. I’ve never heard of you. And I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

  There was a lengthy pause. Just when Tay had decided that the woman had hung up either out of embarrassment or anger — and, frankly, he didn’t really give a damn which one it might be — she spoke up again.

  “Is this the Inspector Samuel Tay who is the investigating officer in case E/1225/09?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I am Dr. Susan Hoi and I have just completed autopsying the deceased Caucasian female found yesterday in a room at the Marriott Hotel who is the subject of that case.”

  A protracted silence followed during which Tay wallowed richly in his embarrassment.

  “Oh, God,” he eventually sighed, not able to think of anything better to say. “I’m so sorry, but nobody told me—”

  “Are you the investigating officer in that case?” the woman snapped. “Or just some asshole who happened to answer his phone?”

  Inspector Tay cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said, “I think I’m probably both.”

  The woman laughed -- thank Christ, Tay thought -- and the sound of it was unexpectedly warm and musical.

  “I really am very sorry,” Tay said, trying to regain his footing. “I just get unreasonably annoyed when someone calls me and just assumes I know what they’re on about. No one told me who was doing the autopsy and you didn’t really say what report you were referring to.”

  “Yes, when you’ve been absorbed in something like this for a while you do rather just assume that everyone else in the world is thinking about it, too.”

  “I am thinking about it,” Tay said, “but right at that moment—”

  “Look,” the woman interrupted again. “Let’s just start over. Shall we do that?”

  “Yes. Fine. Let’s do that.”

  “The reason I’m calling, Inspector, is that I thought you would like to come over and look at this before I close.”

  “Look at what?”

  “The deceased, of
course. The woman from the Marriott.”

  Tay cleared his throat yet one more time. “Thank you, doctor. It’s good of you to offer, but I have no doubt your report will cover everything quite satisfactorily. It won’t be necessary for me to view your work personally.”

  “Oh, but I think it is. You do need to see this, and anyway you’re just across the street. You know where we are, don’t you? I’ll send someone out to wait for you in reception. Shall we say fifteen minutes?”

  “Really, doctor, I can’t—”

  “Fifteen minutes then,” Dr. Hoi interrupted again. “I’m looking forward to meeting you, Inspector.”

  And with that she hung up.

  Inspector Tay sat looking at the receiver for a long moment before he slowly replaced it in its cradle. He rubbed his eyes and slapped his forehead with his palm a few times. He knew he was trapped. He would rather have a root canal than to go over there and peer at that poor woman sliced open from neck to pelvis, but what was he going to do now? Call this doctor back and tell her he tended to throw up at the sight of dead bodies? No, that was out of the question.

  The Centre for Forensic Medicine was located in a building called Block Nine of the Singapore General Hospital just on the other side of New Bridge Road behind the National Heart Centre. The building itself was a nondescript, modern two-story structure that looked to Tay like it could shelter almost any kind of commercial activity. But of course he knew all too well what actually took place inside Block Nine. Equipped as he was with that knowledge, the otherwise unremarkable structure with the aluminum chimney pipes poking out here and there took on a genuinely creepy appearance. Normally it would take him no more than five minutes to walk from his office in the Cantonment Complex to Block Nine. On this day, however, he wondered if he might be able stretch it out a little, perhaps even a lot.

  Like, maybe, to a year or so.

  SEVEN

  A man was waiting for Tay in Block Nine’s tiny reception area. He was wearing a starched lab coat with a breast pocket full of ballpoint pens and shifting from foot to foot. He seemed very young, too young to be a doctor, and Tay wondered if he was. He also wondered briefly whether it was really that this man in particular looked so young or if everyone was starting to look young to him; and of course, if that was so, he knew full well what that meant.

  “Are you Inspector Tay?”

  “Yes, although I’m not particularly happy about it right now.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Never mind.”

  The man looked doubtfully at Tay and pushed his gold-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose. Finally, he gave a little half shrug, which apparently signaled the end of his interest in whatever Tay may or may not have said.

  “This way, please.”

  Tay followed the young man through a door, down a long, white corridor, and through another door. Beyond the second door was yet another long, white corridor, but the man stopped abruptly and knocked lightly at an unmarked door on the right. Without waiting for an answer, he opened it and tilted his head to indicate that Tay should go through.

  The prospect of dealing with whatever was on the other side of that door was decidedly unappealing and Tay tried to catch the young man’s eye hoping to see there some possibility, however slight, of a reprieve. The man wouldn’t look directly at him and Tay didn’t know exactly what to make of that, but he doubted it could be anything good. There seemed to be only two alternatives open to him. Fling up his arms and flee, or take a deep breath and walk through that door.

  Tay took the coward’s way out. He walked through the door.

  To his considerable surprise, the door did not open into some kind of Frankenstein laboratory where rows of partially dissected corpses were laid out on steel tables with unidentifiable fluids draining out of them. Instead, he found himself in an institutional looking office not all that different from his own. Behind the gray metal desk, a woman who appeared to be in her mid-thirties was writing in a file.

  “Give me a second before I lose my thought,” she said, not looking up.

  “Take your time.”

  At the sound of Tay’s voice the woman shifted her eyes toward him without lifting her head and, although she continued to write, he saw her examine him with evident curiosity.

  “Please sit down,” she said, moving her eyes back to the file she was working on. “I’ll just be a moment.”

  Tay sat on a straight chair in front of the desk and took the opportunity to make his own assessment of Dr. Susan Hoi. She was a looker. He had not been prepared for that. Her hair was short and stylishly cut and, although mostly black, there were highlights that appeared almost red under the fluorescent lights of her office. Beneath her white lab coat he could just see what looked like a square-necked black dress and a single strand of pearls. Pearls and a little black dress to cut up dead bodies? Who would have thought?

  The woman sat very straight in her chair, her shoulders back and squared to her work, and wrote quickly with long, fluid strokes. There was something about her posture that Tay found very attractive, enticing even, but how could that be? When encountering a beautiful woman, surely not many men found themselves attracted to her posture. Legs, of course; breasts, yes; face and eyes, naturally; even occasionally arms and hands. Tay had heard there were some men who were attracted to women’s feet, but he couldn’t see Susan Hoi’s feet under her desk and doubted he was one of those men in any case. But to be attracted to a woman’s posture? What in the world did that say about him?

  Before he could decide, she closed the file, adjusted its position on her desk in an unconscious gesture of tidiness, and smiled at him with what seemed to be genuine warmth.

  “I’m glad you could manage the time, Inspector.”

  “It wasn’t time I was short of.”

  “Oh, I see.” Dr. Hoi readjusted the position of the file, although it was obviously unnecessary. “Actually, no, I don’t see.”

  Tay nodded a couple of times while he was trying to decide what to say. He could make some kind of idiotic excuse, he supposed. Or perhaps he could just tell her the truth. If he did that, he would no doubt either get high marks for honesty or come off as a complete jerk. Unfortunately, right off the top of his head he couldn’t think up a convincing lie so it looked like he was stuck going with the truth by default.

  “It’s just that I don’t like looking at dead bodies,” Tay said. “The sight of them makes me nauseous.”

  “But you’re the investigating officer in a homicide.”

  Tay nodded in resignation.

  “Oh, I see,” she said. “This must be your first.”

  “No, I’ve been in CID-SIS for nearly fifteen years.”

  “Fifteen years? And you’re still avoiding dead bodies?”

  “Yes.”

  He waited for her to fill in the rest. It didn’t take long.

  “So you’ve never attended an autopsy,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Or examined the deceased after the autopsy was completed.”

  “No.”

  “I see.” Dr. Hoi folded her arms over her chest and made a little clicking noise with her tongue. “Well, then. What shall we do here?”

  “May I make a suggestion?” Tay asked, shifting his weight on the chair.

  “By all means.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me about what you wanted me to see? You could even draw some diagrams if it would help, or you know…”

  Tay trailed off into silence, feeling like an idiot.

  Dr. Hoi nodded slowly. “All right. That’s fine, I guess.”

  She reopened the file she had been working on when Tay came in, glanced at it briefly as if to refresh her memory, then leaned back in her chair and steepled her fingers, unconsciously tapping the points of her forefingers against her lips.

  “The deceased is a healthy, well-nourished Caucasian woman in her early to mid-forties. My guess is that she’s probably an American. I can’t be certain
, of course, but both her dental work and the polish on her finger and toenails are consistent with an American origin. On the other hand, perhaps she’s French but gets her dental work done in the US and wears American nail polish.”

  “That sounds pretty unlikely to me.”

  “As it does to me.”

  Dr. Hoi glanced down at her file again.

  “From the temperature of the deceased, and taking into account the setting of the air conditioning in the room where she was found, my best guess is that the time of death was between eighteen and twenty hours prior to the discovery of the body.”

  “That means she was killed…” Tay paused to calculate, “between five and seven Monday evening.”

  Dr. Hoi nodded in acknowledgment of Tay’s mathematical acumen.

  “Fingernail scrapings produced no organic matter and the body was relatively unmarked, except of course for the destruction of the face. There were, however, marks on her wrists and ankles that in my view are consistent with restraints having been placed on her in some fashion. At first I thought that might suggest the deceased had engaged in sadomasochistic sexual activity.”

  Dr. Hoi glanced at Tay and in embarrassment he flicked his eyes to the blank wall just over her shoulder.

  “On the other hand there was no evidence of recent intercourse, certainly no semen in the vagina, the anus, or the mouth. Of course, that’s not conclusive. The vagina was badly mutilated by the flashlight and I can’t be absolutely certain no penetration occurred, but the anus was intact and I saw no signs of penetration there. And, of course, her attacker might have used a condom.”

  Dr. Hoi glanced at Tay again, but he was studying the wall with intense concentration.

  “There’s also something else to keep in mind,” she went on when Tay wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Sadomasochism frequently doesn’t entail intercourse, at least not in the usual sense, so we can’t rule out the possibility of sexual activity based purely on the lack of any evidence of intercourse. She had been restrained, that we can say for certain, but the killer may have snapped the handcuffs around both her wrists and ankles simply for the purpose of killing her, not because they were engaged in some form of sexual activity.”